Forgiving Paul for what he did not do

Like all of us, Paul did not do what I accuse him of, for Paul merely did the best he could, for which he could never be faulted. Paul played the role of dragging Jesus into the dream and making Jesus' nondualistic teaching (My Kingdom is NOT of this world) into a dualistic theology and moralism, which is very much about this world and people. Hence the marriage sacrament, which in Christian theology becomes about people instead of about the true Holy Matrimony of our rejoining with our Higher Self, in that moment when, as at the baptism in the River Jordan, we see the heavens part and we hear the Voice for God say: You are my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased. That is really the moment in our experience when we wake up and are ourselves again, we are then rejoined with the True Self we had previously separated from. What God has joined, let not man cast asunder... in truth the separation never happened. In other words, if God forgives us automatically, who are we not to forgive? Even more so when you realize that failure to forgive means self-condemnation. Time to give it up.

After a recent vacation, which offered its own forgiveness opportunities, like every situation in life, I ended up reading again in Ken Wapnick's Journey through the Text of A Course in Miracles on how strong is our tendency to drag Jesus into the dream... it always seems to be our first instinct. So we do not hear his invitation to join him above the battleground, but instead we try to drag him down into our problems that we set up, and fix our flat tires (and worse) for us. And we are making again the archetypical mistake which Paul of investing in Jesus coming back to this world, of which he taught us that it is NOT his Kingdom, his reality, that it is not real. So what on earth makes us think, again and again, that Jesus will come back to this earth and establish his Kingdom here when the invitation is always to flush this nightmare dream down the toilet by the simple act of joining with Jesus in the balcony seat and watch it all unfold from a viewpoint above the battle ground.

Hence, paraphrasing what Jesus says about Judas in the Course, which equally holds about Paul, or indeed about anybody: Paul was a brother, and I could never condemn him for he could not betray me lest I felt betrayed. Jesus is never unsure about his reality, and thus could not feel betrayed by a dream figure. The upshot is, gratitude is in order that my brother is my savior, for without seeing it in front of my face, I would not think even of seeing this behavior in myself. Forgiveness offers the only way out.

... Nor could they [the Apostles] have described my reactions to Judas as they did, if they had really understood me. I could not have said, "Betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?" unless I believed in betrayal. The whole message of the crucifixion was simply that I did not. The "punishment" I was said to have called forth upon Judas was a similar mistake. Judas was my brother and a Son of God, as such as much a part of the Sonship as myself. Was it likely that I would condemn him when I was ready to demonstrate that condemnation is impossible?

As you read the teachings of the Apostles, remember that I told them that there was much they would understand later, because they were not wholly ready to follow me at the time. I do not want you to allow any fear to enter into the thought system towards which I am guiding you. I do not call for martyrs but for teachers.

                                                    ACIM-T-6.I.15:4-16:2

                                                  

Logion 22 in Mark

This one gets really interesting... here we see full scale level confusion at work.

Logion 22 in the Pursah rendering (Gary Renard, Your Immortal Reality) reads as follows:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and want you make male and female into a single one, so the male will not be male and the female will not be female... then you will enter the Kingdom.

In more modern wording we could say: if we heal our dualistic perception, we awaken from the dream, awaken to the reality of who we really are in truth, namely spirit.

It should be noted that Pursah leaves off some material as unauthentic, which Davies goes on to analyze, particular the precursor clauses to Mark 9:43-8, about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin etc. which is a section which in and of itself has resulted in a lot of suffering and misconceptions.

As per usual I'm following Stevan Davies' article on Mark's Use of the Thomas Gospel, Part I , but skipping the sections which Pursah deems spurious anyhow. Next is the following well known passage:
Mark 10:2-9:
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
"What did Moses command you?" he replied.
They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."
"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied.
"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'^[a]
'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,^[b] 8and the two will become one flesh.'^[c] So they are no longer two, but one.
Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
As we can appreciate immediately this has been altered almost beyond recognition, and it is broadly reflective of the transition from Jesus to Paul and Peter, etc., namely an abstract teaching about the healing of duality in the mind, as the precondition for entering the Kingdom, here becomes applied to relationships in the world, and a moralistic teaching, directed at behavior in the world, which is not where Jesus' original teaching was focused at all. Rather, our special relationships in the world, with people, places, and things are the ego's substitute for the Holy Relationship, with our true self, the Christ in us. Jesus, rather than playing traffic cop in the world, is asking the apostles to follow him, out of this world, to his Kingdom not of this world, which is the Real World (in terminology of A Course in Miracles) which we find by living the Holy Relationship. To thine own self be true, as Shakespeare put it. That is what God has joined together, and which we cannot separate, although we do our best to lose ourselves in the world through special relationships.

Finally, an earlier part from the Nag Hammadi version which was also used again in Mark (10:13-16) is again left out by Pursah, apparently on the grounds that she cannot vouch for the authenticity of it, so it may well be another later addition, and I'll skip consideration of it here.

The bottom line is that in the later treatment of this saying we see the transition from a very abstract non-dualistic statement, which in A Course in Miracles we would consider a "level one" statement to a very definite "level two" statement which broadly acknowledges and reinforces some very plainly dualistic concepts, beginning with relationship outside of ourselves.